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And I’m convinced that what happened happened because Norton just didn’t want to lose his good right hand. I’ll go further: it happened because he was scared of what might happen—what Andy might say against him—if Andy ever got clear of Shawshank State Prison.
“What did you say that golf pro’s name was?”
Oh no
He said it was as if Tommy had produced a key which fit a cage in the back of his mind, a cage like his own cell. Only instead of holding a man, that cage held a tiger, and that tiger’s name was Hope. Williams had produced the key that unlocked the cage and the tiger was out, willy-nilly, to roam his brain.
“I like you right where you are, Mr. Dufresne, and as long as I am warden here at Shawshank, you are going to be right here. You see, you used to think that you were better than anyone else. I have gotten pretty good at seeing that on a man’s face. I marked it on yours the first time I walked into the library. It might as well have been written on your forehead in capital letters. That look is gone now, and I like that just fine.
I’ve still got them, and I take them down every so often and think about what a
man can do, if he has time enough and the will to use it, a drop at a time.
Andy wearing his freedom like an invisible coat, about how he never really developed a prison mentality.
He had taken that invisible coat out of the closet and put it on again.
talking with their relatives, smoking cigarettes, telling sincere lies, receiving their picked-over care-packages.
“When I get out of here,” Andy said finally, “I’m going where it’s warm all the time.” He spoke with such calm assurance you would have thought he had only a month or so left to serve. “You know where I’m goin, Red?” “Nope.” “Zihuatanejo,”
“Down in Mexico. It’s a little place maybe twenty miles from Playa Azul and Mexico Highway Thirty-seven. It’s a hundred miles northwest of Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean.
“And where are you going to get the money to buy this fabulous place?” I asked. “Your stock account?” He looked at me and smiled. “That’s not so far wrong,” he said. “Sometimes you startle me, Red.”
This second type of guy knows there’s no harm in hoping for the best as long as you’re prepared for the worst.”
Outside these walls, Red, there’s a man that no living soul has ever seen face to face. He has a Social Security card and a Maine driver’s license. He’s got a birth certificate. Name of Peter Stevens. Nice, anonymous name, huh?” “Who is he?” I asked. I thought I knew what he was going to say, but I couldn’t believe it. “Me.”
“I’ll tell you how it is, Red. There’s a big hayfield in the town of Buxton.
Scarborough. “That’s right. And at the north end of this particular hayfield there’s a rock wall, right out of a Robert Frost poem. And somewhere along the base of that wall is a rock that has no business in a
Maine hayfield. It’s a piece of volcanic glass, and until 1947 it was a paperweight on my office desk. My friend Jim put it in that wall. There’s a key underneath it. The key opens a safe deposit box in the Portland branch of the Casco Bank.”
“Peter Stevens is locked in a safe deposit box at the Casco Bank in Portland and Andy Dufresne is locked in a safe deposit box at Shawshank,” he said. “Tit for tat. And the key that unlocks the box and the money and the new life is under a hunk of black glass in a Buxton hayfield.
I keep thinking about Zihuatanejo and that small hotel. That’s all I want from my life now, Red, and I don’t think that’s too much to want. I didn’t kill Glenn Quentin and I didn’t kill my wife, and that hotel… it’s not too much to want.
And he strolled off, as if he were a free man who had just made another free man a proposition. And for awhile just that was enough to make me feel free.
I fell asleep that night and dreamed of a great glassy black stone in the middle of a hayfield; a stone shaped like a giant blacksmith’s anvil. I was trying to rock the stone up so I could get the key that was underneath. It wouldn’t budge; it was just too damned big. And in the background, but getting closer, I could hear the baying of bloodhounds.
Warden Norton’s famous “Inside-Out” program produced its share of escapees, too. They were the guys who decided they liked what lay to the right of the hyphen better than what lay to the left.
Because you do get institutionalized. When you take away a man’s freedom and teach him to live in a cell, he seems to lose his ability to think in dimensions.
Andy wasn’t that way, but I was. The idea of seeing the Pacific sounded good, but I was afraid that actually being there would scare me to death—the bigness of it.
Apparently he’d been thinking about a lot of other things, as well.
In 1975, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank.
And the poster, of course. It was Linda Ronstadt by then. The poster was right over his bunk. There had been a poster there, in that exact same place, for twenty-six years. And when someone—it was Warden Norton himself, as it turned out, poetic justice if there ever was any—looked behind it, they got one hell of a shock.
I remembered what Andy had once said about feeling he could almost step through the picture and be with the girl. In a very real way, that was exactly what he did—as Norton was only seconds from discovering.
And revealed the gaping, crumbled hole in the concrete behind it.
all knew that Warden Samuel Norton had just passed what the engineers like to call “the breaking strain.” And by God, it almost seemed to me that somewhere I could hear Andy Dufresne laughing.
a wall which looked, in cross-section, like a sandwich. The entire wall was ten feet thick. The inner and outer sections were each about four feet thick. In the center was two feet of pipe-space, and you want to believe that was the meat of the thing… in more ways than one.
Well, that was it for me. I couldn’t help myself. The whole day—hell no, the last thirty years—all came up on me at once and I started laughing fit to split, a laugh such as I’d never had since I was a free man, the kind of laugh I never expected to have inside these gray walls. And oh dear God didn’t it feel good!
I did that fifteen days in solitary practically standing on my head. Maybe because half of me was with Andy Dufresne, Andy Dufresne who had waded in shit and came out clean on the other side, Andy Dufresne, headed for the Pacific.
He must have had just enough clearance at the shoulders to keep moving, and he probably had to shove himself through the places where the lengths of pipe were joined. If it had been me, the claustrophobia would have driven me mad a dozen times over. But he did it.
Three months after that memorable day, Warden Norton resigned. He was a broken man, it gives me great pleasure to report. The spring was gone from his step.
For all I know, Sam Norton is down there in Eliot now, attending services at the Baptist church every Sunday, and wondering how the hell Andy Dufresne ever could have gotten the better of him. I could have told him; the answer to the question is simplicity itself. Some have got it, Sam. And some don’t, and never will.
If it hadn’t been for the eight months Normaden had spent with him after Warden Norton first came in, I do believe that Andy would have been free before Nixon resigned.
Geology had, in fact, become his chief hobby. I imagine it appealed to his patient, meticulous nature.
Pressure. Andy told me once that all of geology is the study of pressure. And time, of course.
Prison is a goddam boring place, and the chance of being surprised by an unscheduled inspection in the middle of the night while he had his poster unstuck probably added some spice to his life during the early years.
When he’d finished, the screwhead started to put out his hand… and then drew it back to himself quickly. He’d forgotten for a moment, you see, that he was dealing with a mascot, not a man.
But Andy just went on playing the game.
I think that maybe Andy got scared.
I’ve told you as well as I can how it is to be an institutional man. At first you can’t stand those four walls, then you get so you can abide them, then you get so you accept them… and then, as your body and your mind and your spirit adjust to live on an HO scale, you get to love them.
I think Andy may have been wrestling with that tiger—that institutional syndrome—and also with the bulking fears that all of it might have been for nothing.
Well, you weren’t writing about yourself, I hear someone in the peanut-gallery saying. You were writing about Andy Dufresne. You’re nothing but a minor character in your own story. But you know, that’s just not so. It’s all about me, every damned word of it. Andy was the part of me they could never lock up,
I sleep poorly at night because the bed in this room, as cheap as the room is, seems much too big and luxurious. I snap awake every morning promptly at six-thirty, feeling disoriented and frightened. My dreams are bad. I have a crazy feeling of free fall. The sensation is as terrifying as it is exhilarating.
it. I began to think about doing something to get back in.
If I had never known Andy, I probably would have done that. But I kept thinking of him,
No, what he needed was just to be free, and if I kicked away what I had, it would be like spitting in the face of everything he had worked so hard to win back.
